Movies On My Mind

Something has to be said about the beauty of the mountains in California. Granted, the mountains along the

are not the highest ones I’ve seen in my life – I’ve been in the Alps and the Caucasus, where the peaks are towering at over 6,000 meters high and the crowns are always covered in ice and snow, sparkling blue under the sun. However, even small mountains, especially the ones facing the ocean, create an impression of something magnificently powerful and beautiful and they wonderfully break a monotony of the vast even space of the ocean.

Meanwhile the road was taking me away from the ocean and into the mountains. I have stopped in a rest area on the way, where I’ve noticed a sign that this road was in the old times a part of El Camino Real, the King’s Highway. As the history goes, in the second part of the XVIII century there was a steady movement of the Spanish and Mexican settlers into the areas in the North, up to Sonoma County. El Presidio de San Diego was the first northern outpost, established in 1769, but in just about 10 years the number of the outposts greatly multiplied and reached out as far to the North as San Francisco, which started in 1776 as El Presidio de San Francisco and the name still remains in that area of the city. El Camino Real was a common name for the roads connecting these outposts together and I am pretty sure it looked much more exotic in those days! Nowadays it’s just a normal highway winding its way sometimes alongside the ocean , sometimes through the mountains and it makes for the most part that famous “scenic route” attracting eager tourists like me.

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In a sense this journey up North on the Highway # 1 was a sort of a pilgrimage for such a movie buff and a lover of Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett detective stories like me. The names of the places around me were all too familiar – Simi Valley, Mulholland Drive, Malibu, Ventura, the canyon roads featuring so much in the movies and in the old detective stories of the 30s and 40s, they sounded almost like I’ve been there before. It’s true I did not get much to see of the towns I’ve been passing by, but at least I’ve got a glimpse of what they look like now and I have to admit, thinking about that gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling.

I always like most of all if the movie or a book is about places I’ve been before, it sort of gives the story more reality and also helps me to have a clearer picture of the events, especially if I am reading the book and have to envision the places where action takes part by myself. May be that’s why I did like Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code” and “Angels and Demons” – one of them was half of the time depicting events in Paris, a city I know like the back of my hand and love very much (been in the Louvre quite a few times myself!), and another was mostly about Rome, where I’ve also been several times and very much liked too.

Meanwhile, my drive along PCH was turning into a much longer trip than I’ve envisioned. I’ve left L.A. at about 10am and by the time I’ve passed Malibu, Ventura and Oxnard, where PCH and the route 101 are beginning to run together again, and came to Santa Barbara it was already close to 3pm and I started to worry that I may not make it to San Francisco at all today as by my count I barely made a quarter of a trip if I were to follow the serpentine pattern of the PCH. Somewhere around Santa Barbara I’ve passed the sign pointing the way to Randolph Hearst’s estate, which I was curious about for a long time. According to some information I’ve read it was a prototype for the Charles Foster Kane Xanadu mansion in Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane” (1941), a movie which is considered by many a golden standard for any film. As a matter of fact, this film was repeatedly named by generations of the film critics as Number One in the short list of the best movies ever made in the history of the cinema. I was seriously tempted to turn onto the road leading to the estate when I’ve noticed that the admittance was only by prior appointment and – alas! – I did not have one. Marking this place for my future adventures on the

I whizzed through Santa Barbara, which turned out to be a fairly large town, compared to the other ones I’ve passed on the way. As I was never a big fan of the “Santa Barbara” series, I was not too keen on exploring this city of rich and famous, though I might still come back to get a better look at it some time in the future…

Next morning after my trip to Disneyland I woke up with a sharp pain in my throat. Talk about bad coincidence – that morning I was planning to head to San Francisco by the scenic route, the famous

. The weather also was not very inviting – the sky was grey and it was definitely cooler than in the last 2 days. Still, minor things like that can’t stop someone who was waiting for a chance to visit San Francisco for years. “What are the pharmacies for?” I thought and promptly headed to the nearest one for a pack of “Halls” and something to drink on the road. All this delayed my departure by an hour and when I finally headed for Santa Monica, where I was to join PCH, it was already 10 am, and – lucky me!- the weather started to clear out. By the time I hit Santa Monica, I was riding under the glorious sun in the blue skies and my spirit rose high. I was lucky indeed, because when the highway finally took me close to the ocean, I was mesmerized by its color – a deep emerald, unbelievably beautiful, and it was the sun that really brought out this deep hue. I’ve seen the oceans and the seas in a different weather and when it’s cloudy the water acquires this dull grey color of the clouds. And so I went – mountains on the right, the Pacific ocean on the left, trying to get a glimpse of the views around and to keep at least one eye on the road at the same time – to tell the truth, it was not easy! The highway went in a serpentine fashion around the mountains and very often the most breathtaking views were opening just around the bend, when a new town would arise before my eyes with its white houses coming down to the ocean. Alas, for such an avid photographer like me there were no chances to make pictures of the best views – the No Stopping signs were quite visible on most part of the highway and I did not want to run into any trouble when I was so far from home!
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The Frontierland was opening before me with the mountains and what looked like a mine – another roller-coaster ride, I thought and decided to pass it up in favor of the town square ahead of me. The town square was basically a small place in front of the “Golden Horseshoe” saloon. As I later found out, inside was a nice café and it also had a stage, so I figured they might be having some shows there now and then. A real show was actually going on right in front of the saloon. The local mayor was trying to get a young cowboy to marry his daughter (both were actors, of course, and not bad at that). Apparently, the list of the local eligible bachelors was running rather short, so the cowboy seemed like the only available option. It was also apparent by the cowboy reaction that the bride-to-be was not such a treasure as the father was portraying her, so he’s suggested to expand the pool of potential husbands by selecting them from the spectators. By that time the lady in question appeared before the crowd and “she” turned out to be a “he” – a man in the dress and the blond wig with the hairy chest and in a rather bad need for a shave. The show was, in fact, really funny, but I had to cut it short as I noticed a grand sailing ship Columbia approaching the pier on the right. I love to watch sailing ships, but never had been on one, so I ran to the pier to get a place on the ship. It actually even had a sort of exposition below the deck on how the sailors of the 19^th century lived and worked. It had a nice historical feel to it, a balm for the eyes of such a museum rat as me! The trip itself was relatively short and the views on the way were mostly related to Indians – Indian chief, Indian village – though there were a small crashed engine on a railroad and the red longjohns drying in the wind, as if reminding of the presence of the white miners in the area – yeah, I know that’s only make-believe, still it was a nice touch, though! J
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